[Femina geekoides]

Tiger installed

I've managed to get Tiger installed, and for the most part everything seems fine. The only oddity is something that cropped up after I had been running everything with no problems for a while. In certain applications (but not others), I get doubled spaces or characters when I type. This is most disruptive in Mail. I find that I can't type any spaces at all in a new mail. As soon as I type a space, I get a system error beep and I can't add anything else. Pasting text in to the document seems to work fine. On some of the other applications where I had this problem (like Safari), trashing the preferences seemed to sort the problem out, but it didn't work for Mail.

I have a hunch that it might be related to the Spelling facility in some way, as I remember getting similar problems years ago when I had Spell Catcher and cocoAspell isntalled. When I try to select the "Spelling..." dialog, nothing happens, so I can't check what language it's set on. The red underlines also don't appear. However, I don't have any of these running, and I've also disabled Typeit4Me in case that was causing issues. Has anyone else come across this?

Other than this — admittedly very irritating — problem, Tiger is great. Spotlight is fantastic, and I love the Smart Folders in Finder. I've got one set up to look for all files in my home folder modified today, which is really useful for quickly locating active documents. I'm also finding the Dashboard widgets surprisingly useful too. I've already translated some French text with it, converted measurements and looked up words in the dictionary. I didn't think I would be using them much, but they are pretty cool. And that 'ripple' effect when you add a widget to the screen is pure eye candy.

As for last night's adventure, I didn't make it to the front of the queue before I had to leave for the party. I trudged sadly past the Apple Store, looking longingly at all of those people trotting happily in to the shop and felt very jealous. As compensation, the party was great fun, and I'll go to the Store when it's less busy. I could even make my own Apple T-shirt, though it wouldn't be quite the same thing. Queueing was actually quite fun, particularly overhearing the incredulous remarks of people walking past and finding out that thousands of people were queueing to get in to a computer shop. The best quote was from a couple of lads, said in a rather dismissive way: "Pfft. Geeks." Yep, we're geeky and proud of it, baby.